He’s happy because Avalon Ventures, which he founded in 1983, has just turned a $5.3 million investment in Zynga, the game company that sits on the Facebook platform, into a $350 million profit.

He’s not happy because he feels the salad days of biotech — when you could take a promising therapeutic protein, and then build a company around it, and IPO that company, or hold on to it all the way to the bank — those days may be over. And Kinsella has an informed opinion on the matter because over the past 34 years he’s helped to bring 100-plus biotech and pharma companies to market, including Vertex and Onyx Pharmaceuticals along with several billion-dollar drugs for cancer and hepatitis.

Kinsella, now in his 60s, waxes realistic as well.

“I’m very skeptical of personalized medicine. We’re already bumping up against the physical age limits of homo sapiens. What more can you do to extend life? Most of the things that you can do, that far outweigh what you might get from a pill, are lifestyle, watching what you eat, getting enough sleep, enough exercise and avoiding stress.

“Yet people still smoke, and they drink to excess. They consume too many fats, too much sugar. Getting your complete genome sequenced, to find genotypic traits that are going to tell you more about your health? It won’t do us much good, and, frankly, I don’t think people really care. If they did, wouldn’t they just change their lifestyle?”

In 1978, Kinsella got in his Ford Pinto and drove out from Boston to San Diego. After graduating from MIT with a major in management and minors in electrical engineering and political science, he got a job at Solar Turbines, eventually handling all international joint ventures, the last time he worked for someone else.

“San Diego had a more interesting climate, a more interesting entrepreneurial community, less parochial than the East Coast,” he explains.

Why San Diego rather than Silicon Valley?

“I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond.”

Of course, less humbly, in America’s VC triangle of Menlo Park, La Jolla and Cambridge, Kinsella and Avalon are best seen as the bluefin tunas — fast, smart and tasty. Big fish, indeed.

Time for a tour of the offices, which are not like most offices. The walls are covered with one of the world’s finest collections of en plein air, or landscape, art. The great room holds two Yamaha grand pianos — one, candy apple red, formerly owned by Elton John, and another, black, a Disklavier recording player piano.

Upstairs is a trophy room dedicated to the musical and movie “Jersey Boys,” which was launched from the La Jolla Playhouse. Kinsella was the lead investor.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Kinsella’s father was the Broadway and TV actor Walter Kinsella, a regular on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Honeymooners.” Downstairs is the screening room (103-inch thin-screen Panasonic).